I assume that for a long time people simply had no idea how long the universe, the earth, life, human life, etc. existed, so either they went with “Who knows? Dumb question” or “This very smart person says it’s x long, so I’ll go with that” and of course more recently, most Jews and Christians pointed to the Bible and guesstimated (with help from Bishop Ussher) a few thousand years for all of it to have started. But at some point, I imagine, some proto-scientific thinkers started thinking in terms of millions of years rather than thousands of years, even if only in terms of “Why not millions? Could that be possible?” sort of thinking.
Who were the first people to postulate a timeline of many millions of years, or even billions for the lifespan of the universe? Were they hooted out of the intellectual community? Ignored? Killed as blashemers? Self-censored? Fitted out for straitjackets?
For a our narrow western population it was Darwin. His concepts allowed academics to discuss history without taking the Biblical flood into account. That opened the modern studies of anthropology and geology.
Really? No one before him had entertained the possibility?
If so, can we track the actual moment old Chuck D. thunk it up? Did he make a diary notation. “Had the oddest notion this afternoon, that perhaps humankind could be more than 10,000 years old, and lickety-split had a second thought: why not 100,000? Or even a milliard? Then I took a nap and made myself a nice cuppa tea when I awoke, but the idea lingers…”
Geologists had been pointing out that the geology of the earth clearly pointed to a much greater length of existence than the few thousand years that Jewish and Chrustian chronologies implied. In particular:
Yeah. As I recall, by the time Darwin came along it was widely accepted that the Earth was very old. Darwin’s theory wasn’t controversial because it agreed that the Earth was old. Even the antievolutionists, had long accepted that.
I don’t mean to hijack, but we’re coming close to the century anniversary of a “holy shit” moment in terms of scale.
Prior to Hubble’s work in the early 1920s, it was thought that our galaxy was likely the whole universe (it wasn’t settled, but that was the main view). He showed that Andromeda was another galaxy, and since then we’ve seen another one or two galaxies.
It should be noted that even the early geologists didn’t get the age of the Earth right, or even close. They were mostly thinking in terms of tens or hundreds of millions of years. When meteorites were finally dated to about 4.5 billion years, there was another “holy shit” moment.
Yep. You can see the influence of that discovery in the works of Lovecraft (where mankind is an insignificant entity in an enormously vast and ancient universe)
While there had been discoveries of ‘Antediluvian man’ - the evidence of humans from before Noah’s flood - made in the early 19th century, it was the scientific verification of flint artefacts in the Somme being found in unquestionable association with prehistoric animals that changed things forever. It happened to be in 1859 - the same year as Origin of the Species was published.
The verification followed up an earlier claim by Boucher de Perthes, who couldn’t quite make the argument and evidence gel convincingly, so John Evans and Jsoeph Prestwish [archaeologist and geologist] examined the site and produced an authoritative report confirming the find.
I think it was a holy shit moment because, independent of Darwin, it gave humanity an antiquity with geological depth, so geological scale time processes like evolution could be considered as part of the human story.